


2021 Mystery Fic Challenge

by ToastedBrioche



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: 69 (Sex Position), Alternate Universe - College/University, Blood, Cunnilingus, Dubious Consent, F/F, Face-Sitting, Fingering, First Time, Fisting, Hate Sex, Kissing, Masturbation, Mental Health Issues, No-Cytherea AU, Obedience, Pegging, People Being Bad At Sex, Porn with Feelings, Sploon, Unsafe breathplay, You Are Allowed To Want, arguing n fucking, dubious adherence to canon, saying things without thinking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-21
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-12 17:14:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 18,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29139117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ToastedBrioche/pseuds/ToastedBrioche
Summary: Harrow and Gideon realize, abruptly, that their hatefucking is no longer hatefuckingThis is a game set up for a group of us to guess who wrote which chapter, just to amuse ourselves. Every chapter of this fic was written by a different person. Feel free to ignore it!
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 15
Kudos: 69





	1. Bone Me To Death

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Set during chapter 5 of Gideon the Ninth.  
> Tags: kissing, provocation, fingering, saying things without thinking first

_ “Give me that,” commanded Harrow, and she took the fat stick of black char from Gideon’s hand. She tried to turn Gideon’s face up to hers by force, fingers grasping beneath the chin, but Gideon promptly bit her. There was a simple joy in watching Harrow swear furiously and shake her hand and peel off the bitten glove, like in seeing sunlight or eating a good meal. _

Harrow began fiddling ominously with one of the bone pins at her ear and Gideon, knowing she was playing with fire, let a broad grin spread across her face, teeth and all. Harrow’s brows furrowed. “Nav,” she threatened, “we can do this the easy way, or…”

She trailed off, dangerously, and Gideon stuck out her tongue at her. The bone chips sprung from Harrow’s hands in a terrible arc, unfolding as they fell into humeri and radii and full skeleton arms that pinned Gideon to the chair and snapped her head back with a horrifying crunch of her vertebrae. Cold, bony fingers wrapped around Gideon’s chin and held her in place, hard and impassive.

“There,” Harrow said. She sounded very smug. She hadn’t even broken a sweat, bloody or otherwise. “Don’t say I didn’t offer the easy way.” The stick of paint approached like a particularly vindictive insect; Harrow stroked it beneath Gideon’s eyes, none too gently. Gideon braced herself for an exciting jab in the cornea.

“Hold your mouth closed, Nav,” Harrow said, irritated, when she tried to add the slashes of black paint across her lips and Gideon pulled a face. “You’re only making it worse for yourself.”

The skeletal hand at her chin extended a finger along her jawline, creeping towards her right ear. “Fuck you, Nonagesimus.”

“Fuck me yourself, coward.”

Gideon exploded out of the chair with such force that the constructs shattered away into a flurry of bone chips; she shot forward, pinning Harrow to the table behind her. The necromancer’s still-ungloved hand scrambled over the piles of open books, dislodging several musty ancient tomes and sending them tumbling to the floor. Gideon’s fingers closed around the back of Harrow’s neck, cupping the base of her skull. “Shouldn’t have said that,” she growled.

She expected a comeback, a barbed remark, an acerbic insult aimed straight and true for Gideon’s soft, shameful underbelly. What she got instead was Nonagesimus’ dark eyes widening, pupils blown out, and flickering down to Gideon’s mouth.

What she should have done was wrap her hands around Harrow’s throat. She should have pushed her down and knocked her unconscious on the hard edge of the table, or rammed her elbow down onto her skinny chest and at least cracked a few of her stupid, fragile necro ribs.

What she did instead (what the fuck) was bend her head and (what the fuck) kiss Harrowhark Nonagesimus on her thin, paint-covered lips.

Gideon was no expert in kissing by any means — who the fuck would she have kissed, the Great Aunts? — but she could tell this one was bad. There were too many teeth involved, for one, and Ninth House grease paint tasted disgusting, and she was fairly sure that Harrow was actually trying to bite her, but then something shifted. Harrow tilted her head underneath her, changing the angle, and that was better; Gideon leaned down further, holding Harrow down against the table with the weight of her body, the edges and points of her bone corselet digging into Gideon’s chest. Harrow’s lips parted, and Gideon ventured forth with her tongue, experimentally, then with more force when Harrow groaned into her mouth.

Harrow’s hands fluttered uselessly at Gideon’s shoulders. If she had wanted to, she could have summoned a construct from any one of the billions of bones that surrounded them and pushed Gideon off, but she did no such thing, just scrambled at Gideon’s robes with her witchy little claws. Gideon grabbed her birdlike wrists with one hand and pinned them above her head, interrupting the kiss.

“What?” Harrow asked, eyes gleaming. “Is that all?”

“Oh, fuck you—”

Harrow arched her back, pushing up against her. “I thought we’d established my stance on this,” she said primly, then gasped when Gideon pressed her knee between her legs. For the briefest of moments, she ground down against it shamelessly. “Well?”

Gideon bit back another remark that would have been embarrassingly similar to her last. She had one hand full of necro wrist and a film of greasepaint coating the inside of her mouth, and a throb of heat in her belly that wasn’t just anger. She stared down at the Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House spread out in front of her, chest heaving, and then her free hand was fumbling with the buttons on Harrow’s pants and she was putting her actual hands on Harrowhark Nonagesimus’ actual bare skin (shit), fingers carding through the curls of dark hair and venturing further downward.

Harrow’s breath echoed in the damp, miserable library, proof of her arousal hot and damp on Gideon’s fingers as she writhed against her. Gideon put more weight into the grip on Harrow’s wrists, imagining the bruises that would form there and how sore she would be tomorrow under all those layers of black cloth, and then she bit her lip and finally found Harrow’s clit with her fingertips. The noise Harrow made was immensely gratifying, high-pitched and a little like a distressed rodent. Gideon traced circles around the sensitive bud, each one immediately translated into a desperate jerking of Harrow’s hips.

“Griddle,” Harrow groaned, straining against Gideon’s grip with all three of her muscles. “Let me up.”

“No chance,” Gideon said, but she did snatch her hand back. “You’re just going to bone me to death.”

The lady of the Ninth House rolled her eyes so hard it was practically audible. “I’m trying, you oaf! For once in your life, do as I say!”

Underneath her smeared paint, Gideon felt herself flush. If what she had been doing was dangerous territory, this was the equivalent of walking behind enemy lines with a big sign around your neck saying ‘PLEASE STAB ME WITH BONES’. But there was a desperate tendril of want rearing its head inside her, fighting the stabbing reminder that had been drilled into her since she was very small that  _ nobody wanted her _ , and for the first time since she had been a child, that voice was losing. She looked down at the Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House lying under her, hips desperately searching for contact, her small breasts pushed up by the arch of her spine, her skull paint smeared unforgivably by Gideon’s own lips, and Gideon Nav made a decision.

That was how they ended up on the dusty, decaying sofa, hands down each other’s pants, Harrow’s pointy little teeth biting at Gideon’s throat, their breath hard and fast in the damp air. Gideon had to teach Harrow how to touch her, by demonstrating, which was both mortifying and hot as fuck, once she got over the weirdness of this whole situation and accepted that this was, apparently, something they were doing now. Even as the heat curled in her belly and pooled between her legs she expected at any moment to be yanked to her feet by skeleton hands and summarily tossed down a drill shaft, but no such thing happened. Instead, Harrow’s forehead, painted white and beaded with sweat, came to rest on Gideon’s shoulder as she shook and shuddered and sighed through her orgasm, her fingers curling inside Gideon almost reflexively. Gideon swore and followed her over the edge, and then they were lying there in the gray light, close enough that they could have quite comfortably throttled each other.

For the briefest of moments, Gideon considered this. It was the best chance she was ever going to get, with Harrow distracted and spent and vulnerable, but even if she’d thought she could get away with it, she was momentarily too overcome with boneless, fatigued contentment. Harrow’s body was hot where it was pressed against her own, their legs tangled together on the narrow seat so they wouldn’t fall off, and Harrow turned her face into Gideon’s neck and let out a little sigh that seemed to dissipate all the tension from her bony shoulders. Gideon’s arm moved without any input from her brain (which was typical) and came to rest across Harrow’s waist.

They both froze.

Gideon, very carefully, spread her hand over Harrow’s scapula.

Harrow lifted her head and glared up at her. “What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?”

Shrugging with as much nonchalance as she could muster, she said, “It’s called cuddling, Nonagesimus. Never heard of it?”

She snorted. “Of course I’ve heard of it.”

“Well then.”

They stared at each other.

At a speed of perhaps a micrometer per myriad, Harrow dropped her head again, her breath hot on Gideon’s skin. One of her hands — the right one, the one Gideon had snapped her teeth at — burrowed under the layers of Gideon’s clothes and curled, delicately, over her eighth and ninth ribs.


	2. How it Happens

When they were children, it had been easy. Easy to hate; easy to fight; easy to turn each collision into a cathartic explosion of blows - steel crushing bone, bootheel grinding into sternum, bloody noses and bloody fingernails. 

Puberty had changed things. Hormones transformed the perfect simplicity of violence into something more charged. The years went by and the tension between them became looming and ever-present, like atmospheric pressure, a storm cloud which never loosed its thunder, a fever climbing and climbing and never breaking. 

It felt like they were waiting for something, but _something_ never came. They toyed with their bindings, deferred the newly-complex pleasures of brutal enmity, pulled at the leash. Harrow spent days, sometimes weeks, in silent seclusion, knowing that Gideon would spend those weeks stalking the halls, snappish and on edge for reasons she couldn’t define. Gideon’s escape attempts now numbered in the hundreds, but on each occasion Harrow was there to stop her - the Reverend Daughter’s authority like a shackle around her throat. Every time, Gideon gets a little closer to success, and Harrow lies awake for nights afterwards, tormented by the possibility that next time Gideon might get away. 

~

Impossible to say, now, when everything changed. When Gideon tries to recall, she remembers Harrow crushed up against the wall, winded, lips parted and chest heaving as she fights for breath. She remembers her knee between Harrow’s legs to pin her in place, intending nothing more than a well-aimed blow with her fists, until she feels the startling heat there. Harrow’s thighs clenched tight around hers, long-fingered hands gripping her hair, nails sharp against her scalp. Harrow’s half-vocalised protests trailing off abruptly as Gideon’s hands drop from her shoulders to the curve of her breasts. 

She remembers the exquisite sense of power, hearing constructs crumble around her as Harrow’s concentration is shattered. She whispers in Harrow’s ear, filth and vitriol, every hateful thought she’s ever had about the Reverend Daughter, spitting bile as she lifts Harrow’s skirts and slips a hand underneath, vindicated in her malice as Harrow raises neither hand nor voice to stop her. 

She smells of Harrow, afterwards, and the scent is so similar, yet so subtly different to her own. She brings her fingers to her lips in the dark of her cell and tastes blood, and salt, and freedom.

This isn’t how it happens. 

~

Harrow remembers Gideon on the floor, pinned in place by unbreakable bone but still fighting like a thing possessed. Robe lost somewhere in the scuffle, the hem of her shirt come loose from her pants, exposing a flash of bare skin. A surge of something hot and primal, like hatred, and then she’s falling to her knees, sinking her nails deep into that vulnerable flesh as Gideon bucks and howls beneath her; the uncontrollable urge to despoil the smooth perfection of her stomach, like pissing across a fresh fall of snow. Hands, slick with Gideon’s blood, seeking lower and finding a different kind of slickness. Pushing inside as though she could reach all the way to Gideon’s heart and crush it. 

She remembers the perfect arch of Gideon’s back, her cries modulating into moans. Gideon’s pants have slipped down around her knees, and Harrow has more freedom to move; she cups her palm, drawing her fingers together into a single, decisive whole, like a blade, or a battering ram. She works her hand mercilessly inside, a destruction, a _dissection_.

She puts a hand over Gideon’s mouth, because the sounds make this too real. Gideon bites her, breaks the skin, but Harrow is no stranger to pain. She keeps her hand in place as Gideon’s mouth floods with her blood, and Gideon’s breath is wet, laboured, nostrils flared wide as she fights not to choke. Gideon’s eyes are huge, whites showing all around the gold of her irises; the intoxication of desire laced with panic. Their gazes meet, and in the look they exchange is the knowledge that Gideon could die here; she could drown in blood, Harrow’s hand deep in her cunt. 

Harrow doesn’t kill her; instead she chooses the little death, the larger cruelty. As Gideon’s climax hits, Harrow moves her bloody hand from Gideon’s face, and kisses her, tasting her own blood made strange by the alchemy of Gideon’s body.

This isn’t how it happens, either.

~

The truth is more fumbling, less certain. Nothing so definitive as these remembered conquerings. That first time, they are merely objects in space, colliding with a messy, inexorable gravity. 

~

Today, it’s the _taptaptap_ of buttons as they ricochet off the wall, ripped loose from Gideon’s shirt in Harrow’s haste to get it off her. It’s Harrow’s teeth, digging into the swell of Gideon’s breast above her bandeau, like she’s about to tear free a bloody chunk of flesh, raising welts that bisect the half-healed wounds from the last time she did this. Gideon barely bruises, never scars, and this is a source of unending frustration to Harrow, who would keep Gideon black and blue and bloody from the collar of her shirt down, every inch of her overwritten with possession and ownership. If she cannot have the fealty of Gideon’s heart, then she will wring fidelity and supplication from her body. 

Today it’s the unconscious rocking of Harrow’s hips, grinding against Gideon’s palm, the flush of Harrow’s skin, and her barely-vocalised whimpering, the power Gideon feels in teasing forth these unwilling responses. It’s knowing that she’ll die here - on the Ninth, bearing her inflated serfdom all the way to the grave and beyond - but the knowledge mitigated, temporarily, by the heady rush of control. On this battlefield, they are always equals. 

Today it’s Harrow’s hands tight around Gideon’s throat, Gideon’s hand between Harrow’s legs, an unblinking, unwavering stare brimming with something that isn’t _just_ hatred, isn’t quite hatred at all, any more. It isn’t the first time they’ve played this game, or something like it. A race to the finish line; will Harrow succumb first, hands going slack with pleasure, before Gideon feels the prickling rush that precedes unconsciousness? Or will Gideon’s eyes flutter closed, will she sink to her knees, on the very precipice of blacking out, and come back to herself with her face in Harrow’s cunt? 

Today it’s neither. Harrow pushes her too far, and Gideon is too stubborn to stop her. Instead of the graceful defeat of kneeling, Gideon falls hard, too deep into the blackness to catch herself. She doesn’t even feel it, as her head lolls, body bonelessly slack. Harrow tries to catch her, and does not examine why it is so important that she does not let Gideon fall. 

~

Gideon falls. Harrow falls with her, pinned to the floor by the dead weight of her mistakes. _She fucked up._ She lost control, and with it, the only thing which ever mattered. Stupid to think that Gideon was invulnerable, a safe vessel for things too big for Harrow to hold. Gideon may have survived the genocide of Harrow’s creation, but what beautiful thing could ever outlast the horror which that long-ago genocide had birthed?

Harrow prays. She prays to the Tomb, and to God, and to Gideon herself. She is naked, without her knucklebones, so instead she counts her prayers against each beloved bone in Gideon’s broken body, and, for the first time since her parents died, she weeps.

~

Gideon wakes on the floor with Harrow beneath her, and she thinks she knows this rocking of Harrow’s body; she thinks she understands the tension in her muscles, the catch in her breath, and it isn’t until she sees Harrow’s face, sees the tracks of tears washing away her paint, that Gideon realises that Harrow is crying. 

Gideon’s head is still foggy, her limbs still lethargic, but the sight of the Reverend Daughter weeping is like ice water in her veins, washing away all lassitude. _Harrow doesn’t cry;_ the cornerstone of Gideon’s whole existence, the one constant in her life, is the sure and certain knowledge that Dominicus itself will burn out before Harrowhark Nonagesimus experiences anything as banal as an emotion. 

Harrow _can’t_ have feelings, because if it’s possible for Harrow to feel, might it be possible for Gideon to have feelings for Harrow? Unthinkable. Except now she’s thinking it. Deep inside her is a roiling gyre of hatred and resentment and spite, and she’s been fighting her whole life to keep her head above water. Now she gives in and lets herself be pulled under. Beneath the waves is... peace. A calm, still centre. Something that might be _love._

In a response as automatic and instinctual as pulling her hand from a flame, Gideon shifts her weight to the side, cradling Harrow in her arms, and the Reverend Daughter’s body has always been small, but it has never felt fragile before. Harrow’s skin is fever-hot, where it touches Gideon’s, but she’s shivering. 

Harrow’s lips are moving, and Gideon has to duck her head to hear the whispered litany: _I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,_ uttered like a prayer. The Reverend Daughter has hurt her a thousand times before, without a flicker of remorse, and Gideon opens her mouth to say this, but what comes out is: _I’m okay._

~

Afterwards neither of them will be able to say whether Gideon carried Harrow to the bed, or whether Harrow coaxed Gideon into it, but either way, it seems like they spend hours on the cold floor before making it that far. By the time they are there, curled together between thin blankets and thinner sheets, the refrain of _I’m sorry/I’m okay_ has morphed, transmuted, evolved into _I love you, I love you. I love you._ And Harrow is pressing kisses, feather light, to each bruise she’s ever left on Gideon’s skin, discovering that she remembers each and every one long after they’ve healed. And Gideon is stroking her back - soothing, gentling, offering comfort with her touch. 

This is how it happens. 

Harrow on her knees between Gideon’s legs, worshipful, reverent, bringing Gideon to climax after soft, sobbing climax; Gideon running her hands through the close crop of Harrow’s hair, tasting herself on Harrow’s lips as they kiss; their fingers twined, Gideon guiding Harrow’s hands over the small swell of her breasts, the prominent arch of her ribs, the valley of her stomach, learning together to find joy in her body, which had only ever been a vessel for righteous agonies and profane pleasures. 

This is how it always happens, now.


	3. Oops?????????

It's become routine: Harrow spends the day figuring out the necromancy end of killing God, Gideon spends the day figuring out the war end of killing God, they both come back to their quarters high on adrenaline and fuck each other into oblivion.

This doesn't mean things have been _great_ in the time since Gideon's resurrection. Gideon is still pissed at Harrow for being an uptight bitch and Harrow is still pissed at Gideon for — well, Gideon doesn't really know what, but Harrow's never needed an excuse to be pissed at her. It's just her default state of existence. Nothing has really changed.

Except the fucking. _That's_ new.

It usually happens like this:

> **Gideon, our heroine, has never done anything wrong in her life:** [lounging on a sofa, reading a book or magazine or comic, enjoying a few minutes of peace post-shower and before bed]
> 
> **Harrow, a heinous evil witch with a huge stick up her ass and zero capacity for any kind of fun:** [storms in the room] Griddle, I hate you. You should have been naked five minutes before my arrival.
> 
> **Gideon, totally taken aback by these events, refusing to look up from her book:** Oh, excuse me, your malevolent highness, am I supposed to be able to read your goddamn mind still? By the way, I hate you, too.
> 
> **Harrow, exasperated, voice rising to a pitch Gideon didn't realize was humanly capable:** We do this _every night_ you moronic garbage can full of muscle. Get naked and fuck my brains out so I can hate you even more than I already do.
> 
> **Gideon, now VERY RELUCTANTLY turned on, because she HATES this bitch, REALLY AND TRULY SHE DOES and only wants to GET LAID and NO ONE ELSE around here seems to be offering:** Fucking FINE, but I WON'T LIKE IT.

So here she is, face smothered in pussy, not because she _enjoys_ eating Harrow out but because she won't have _anyone ever_ say she isn't a generous lover, and Harrow is riding her face, grinding her clit against Gideon's nose and making the most delicious little gasps and cries above her, when suddenly the thought _fuck, I love her_ passes through Gideon's mind.

She freezes with her tongue shoved as far up Harrow's cunt as she can make it reach.

After a few seconds Harrow's cries become an exasperated sigh and she says, "Move your tongue more. You _know_ how I like you."

And then Harrow freezes too.

"I meant _it_ ," she splutters. "You know how I like _it_."

But it's too late. Gideon knows from her own reaction to her stupid intrusive thought what it means that Harrow has apparently had the exact same reaction to her own slip-up.

Talking really shouldn't be allowed during sex. _Thinking_ shouldn't be allowed during sex. There's too many hormones and chemicals taking up brain power for your brain to have any cognizant abilities. Wires get crossed and soon shit like "I don't hate this person I've loathed my whole life" starts seeming like a rational thing to believe.

Gideon slowly pulls her tongue out of Harrow's vagina. Harrow slowly slides off Gideon's face and lies down on the bed, her head near Gideon's feet and her feet by Gideon's head.

After a few minutes of silence Harrow says, "I should go shower," at the same moment Gideon says, "You wanna talk about it?"

Harrow makes a weird strangled noise but doesn't move.

Gideon tries a different approach.

"You liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiike me," she says in a drippy voice, a hand reaching over to tickle Harrow's thigh.

This manages to extract a swat at her hand and an _oh, shut up_ from Harrow but nothing more.

Which is good? Harrow didn't deny it, at least.

But fuck???? What does this mean??? What does this do to their whole dynamic?

"What does this mean?" Gideon asks. "What does this do to our whole dynamic? Uh, for what it's worth, I think I like you, too?"

"Really?" Harrow says, propping herself up to get a look at Gideon. It's a much softer look than how Harrow usually looks at her, possibly has ever looked at her.

"I think I do?"

"Well, then. That's better than knowing you don't, I suppose."

"You haven't answered any of the questions I asked you."

Harrow makes that weird strangled noise again and flops herself back down.

"Maybe I don't know any of the answers yet."

"Okay," Gideon says, and then again, "okay. Uh. What do you want to do right now?"

"I'd like to have that orgasm I was chasing, if you'd want to help."

And sure, Gideon thinks. They've got time to work this out later. 

"Sure," Gideon says. "Wanna sixty-nine it real quick? We're already almost there."

"That sounds ideal," Harrow says, already rolling herself over on top of Gideon.

"Who knows," Gideon says before she goes back to work, "maybe we can even cuddle when we're done."

And Harrow makes that weird strangled noise a third time, but this time it's muffled by the fact that she makes it directly into Gideon's cunt.


	4. time to talk

Sharp fingernails scratched down Gideon’s back, sending a white-hot spark shivering down her spine, another droplet of fire to add to the heat between her legs. She could feel Harrowhark against her, feel the sharpness of her pelvic bone beneath one hand, and the prickling ends of stubble beneath the other as she wrapped her arms around the other girl and pulled her closer. Harrow was straddling Gideon’s hips, practically sitting on her lap, and kissing her like something terrible would happen when - if - she stopped. She had one hand tangled in Gideon’s hair now, her long fingers twining through the strands, while the other hand, long nails and all, was gripping Gideon’s shoulder with what felt like enough force to bruise. They hadn’t planned this, it was just, Harrow had been being an absolute bitch, _again_ , all cold and imperious and arrogant and Gideon had just been so goddamn sick of it that she’d pushed Harrow up against the nearest wall and kissed her until she shut the hell up. That had been the first time. There had been a lot of times since then, because it turned out that sex was better than fighting, even if there wasn’t a clear victory.

Although, Gideon sure as hell _felt_ like she was winning, when she had Harrow coming apart beneath her, the other girl’s soft moans filling the air, all her insults, all her biting little comments held back because Gideon was there, driving every coherent thought from her head. They broke for air, then, both panting as Harrow nested her head against Gideon’s clavicle, and Gideon’s wrapped her arms around her and kept her close. This was – well, this was where the problem happened. Here, in the dark, with the air full of the scents of sweat, and soap, and Harrow’s face paint, Gideon could not help but feel like an exposed livewire, sparking at every one of Harrow’s touches, and now, especially goddamn now, when they were just… just… just holding each other. And it wasn’t like she _couldn’t_ let go, it wasn’t like they had to be holding one another, it was just that they were and that this wasn’t the way it was supposed to go.

It was supposed to be harsh and biting, like everything else about their relationship. It was supposed to be just another way to hook their claws into one another, to make the other vulnerable. Except right then, Gideon was not sure if she would be more or less undone if Harrow went back to kissing her now. She was not sure what she wanted; to keep going, to stop, to stay frozen in this moment, or to push onward to the inevitable frantic fumbling that was supposed to follow, or to- to say something, to ask if Harrow could feel this, this whatever it was. She was not sure, either then or later, if it was better or worse than having to make the choice herself, to have Harrowhark sit back in her arms, so that they were no longer chest to chest, but perhaps half a foot apart, Harrow’s dark eyes meeting Gideon’s golden ones. There were no words there, but Gideon could see the same uncertainty, the same half-hope flickering inside her reflected back.

“Griddle,” Harrow’s voice had none of its usual iciness, none of her careful poise, but it still cut through the air like a hot knife through fat. “Griddle what are you doing?”

“I…” Gideon began, then cut herself off, because she didn’t know the answer.

“We should-” Harrow cut herself off, with just the briefest shake of her head, then, after another breathless interval, “we have to talk about this.” And then, “Griddle,” and then, almost more than she could bear. “Please.”

“Later,” Gideon’s reply was little more than a breath as she traced her fingers upwards, over the softness of Harrow’s skin, and the hard nubs of her spinal column beneath, until her hand was pressed against the centre of Harrow’s back. “Later.”

“And now?” Harrow did not resist, as Gideon pulled their bodies together again.

“Now,” Gideon said, with absolute certainty, “is not the time for talking.” And she kissed Harrow again, long and slow and deep and desperate, and they did not talk again for a long, long time after that.


	5. words hung above (but never would form)

They had been at Canaan House for three years, six months, and twelve days when it happened. It was a normal morning: the grey and rainy light trickled in through their window, partially stifled by the shadow of the dock above. All around them lay the stark effects of the Ninth and the decaying, richly coloured splendor of whoever had lived here first, black shards jolted off the chandelier by one jumping jack too many, half-neglected rapier discarded at the threshold, notes partially written in cramped script and left behind by the Sixth as shared property. Harrow had braced her spindly knee against the top of the couch. Her eyebrows were so tightly pulled together that she had had to close her eyes, and her paint was ruined at lip and jaw, so that the top half of her face was a perfectly wrinkled skull and the bottom half was a blur with an open mouth. Her robes of office were rucked up around her thighs.

Gideon was holding onto these in an appropriately _the-cavalier-must-compensate-for-the-body-of-the-necromancer_ sort of way, so that she could see unpainted skin and the barest trace of dark hair. She didn't really _need_ to see more (her mouth knew the way), but the effect was really powerful. So was the sting of Harrow's hands in her hair. In retrospect, Gideon would think, the sum of these and the smell of her necromancer (eau de ashes, ink, blood sweat, and Ninth paint, but also, with her robes up, someone who was extremely wet) had twisted her into a stupid little knot and rendered her incapable. For this reason, she should not have been held culpable for shrugging Harrow a little bit closer, wetting her lips, and saying "fuck, I love you" directly to her cunt.

There was one precious moment of silence where Gideon hoped that, against all odds, Harrow might pretend not to hear her, smother her with her vagina, and have done with it. Then Harrow's mean little hands ripped out of her hair and, ignoring her plaintive yelp, shoved herself to the left and off of Gideon.

"What?" Harrow demanded. _"What?"_

The first _what_ was fine. Perfectly standard Nonagesimus fare: mean, haughty, conveying that Gideon was an idiot and that Harrow was a nun with a stick up her ass. But she was horrified to hear the second _what_ pick up a trace or two of real, actual emotion, like a human being might have.

"Uh," said Gideon intelligently, who, in her own defense, had just been about to eat her out and was still dedicating at least sixty percent of her brain to lingual intuition.

"Absolutely not," Harrow said, and this took Gideon right out of horrified and into apocalyptic territory, because her voice broke in the middle. "No. I won't — ”

But Gideon never heard what she wouldn't do. (It was looking like it was Gideon herself, anyway.) Instead, something cold and slightly wet closed around her wrists, and then, when she tried to yank away, around her chest, and then Harrow was leaving rapidly, having grown a prison of a ribcage from the pile of discarded bones pressed against the base of the window.

"Harrowhark!" Gideon roared ineffectively at the closing door. "Don't you dare — are you seriously — ”

But it was pointless. She was already gone.

* * *

Bones usually didn't take Gideon very much effort to break out of. She had a lifetime of experience shattering rogue ulnas, kicking in wayward skulls, and stomping on hostile vertebrae. She was an absolute skeleton-breaking professional with Ninth House certification. Because of this, it really stung that it took almost ten minutes for her to lever the ribcage apart. Not only had Harrow put some of her best work into those bones, but she'd glued all the joints together with some kind of disgusting cement-like ligament, something Gideon hadn't even known she was capable of.

By the time she threw the door open and jumped (paintless, disheveled) into the hallway, her adept wasn't there. Instead, the last people she wanted to see were passing by, a group that included everyone else at Canaan House but in this case was just Isaac Tettares and Jeannemary Chatur.

"Ninth!" said Isaac reflexively. (His cavalier's reflex had been to half-draw her rapier before she registered it was Gideon.) "Are you — um — okay? Magnus said the Reverend Daughter went by in a hurry and that we should go check on you."

"Does she look okay to you?" demanded Jeannemary at a normal volume. Instead of learning about what Coronabeth called "inside thoughts," she had eventually abandoned the pretense of _sotto voce_ and now just said everything out loud. Gideon had yet to figure out whether that was an improvement.

"Where?" Gideon demanded.

Thankfully by this point he'd seen her operating more on brawn than brains enough times. "She went downstairs," Isaac said wincingly.

That thought ran Drearburh ice down the back of Gideon's neck. She took off at a sprint, leaving the teens of dubious quality behind.

Unfortunately for her, Isaac was right. Harrow had definitely fled to the hatch; Ianthe Tridentarius was lurking by the broken lift, so she could waylay Gideon and say something rancid and Third about "propositioning the bond unbroken," and then look vaguely astonished when Gideon promised to thrash Tern for her later. She booted in the water-swelled door with feeling and left it reeling on one hinge to half-run, half-grimace across the windswept terrace, up the tower, and, finally, back inside.

She was too late. Harrow was nowhere to be found; there was only the despicable hatch, lying closed in the darkness.

* * *

Gideon had a little panic there, where no one would hear her. After the funeral for the Eighth all the nice, sensible, people remaining, plus Harrow, had agreed that none of them would be going down into the facility below without at least one other necro-cav pair, and that before they did everybody would be warded against ghosts over their whole body and up both nostrils. The siphoning challenge had also been marked off-limits for a whole year while Harrow, Sextus, and Abigail had worked out how to study it without any more losses. Gideon knew for a fact that Harrow wasn't done studying it, and she knew for a fact that Harrow hadn't taken the time to say mean things while Gideon painted her whole body in blood mixed with adhesive, or to check it over in a mirror, something that usually took her upwards of an hour.

She also _definitely_ knew that Harrow hadn't done the same for her. Harrow had been way more interested that morning in seeing how many fingers she could fit inside her cavalier, and in leaving angry red marks all over Gideon's tits. She hadn't dragged any cold bone-and-hair brush over Gideon's ribs or muttered the same old admonishments at her about what she could and couldn't (mostly couldn't) do.

After a few minutes of standing there miserably, hoping Harrow would come out and make an oss to put her corpse in, someone else's footsteps started echoing down the stairs. Gideon scrubbed at her eyes and pulled herself together as fast as only someone who'd grown up around Crux could. Then she groped for her sword and realized it was nowhere to be found, which sort of undid some of that hard work.

Luckily for her, it was Magnus. "Buck up, Gideon," he said, and if his cheer was a little bit forced, well, that seemed appropriate. "We're getting ready to follow her."

She slumped along behind him, back to the Fifth's rooms. This was a place that Gideon associated with only the best things: first dinner party — first dessert — first _birthday_ party — and the time she had gotten Harrow to drink a little wine, on the grounds that everyone else was already drunk, and would never remember anything she did.

(Gideon thought about the alarmed look on her face when she realized she had grown clumsy, and her demand for Gideon to help her find a book with instructions on flushing alcohol from one's system, and how she'd slept for forty minutes in the library with her head on Gideon's shoulder, and felt like the bottom of a shoe.)

Today, though, the place was chock full of necromancers with bloody brushes. Abigail apparently already had scarred wards, but Isaac was still working on her face. Gideon wasn't sure if this was for some extra help or just a teaching moment. Sextus and Camilla were seated directly opposite each other in matching chairs, so that Sextus could examine his cavalier's face while Dulcinea started to work on his arms. Gideon tore her eyes away from that fraught tableau pretty fast; even if it looked totally normal otherwise, and she wasn't sure it did, Dulcinea was demonstrative in a way she'd never before seen in her life.

Telling Harrow she loved her was like being told she'd been stabbed — now that it had been pointed out to her, she couldn't stop thinking about it. Her entire body was trained on this one awful ridiculous thought. Worse, Gideon had done the pointing-out herself, without ever registering what was happening. All the times Harrow had carefully made sure nothing in the facility below would hijack her made one sickly, compacted ball in her gut. Surely _she_ hadn't looked so — well — obvious?

Harrow had fled the length of Canaan House with fucked-up paint to get away from her.

Gideon made one depressed trip back to their quarters with the excuse that she didn't have her sword. Instead of picking up the two-hander that basically everyone knew about, she tied the rapier back to her belt and grabbed the gauntlet off of its shelf. The bathroom yielded what she had gone back for: a little bone box containing two mostly-full containers of blessed paint, and a length of rag she could wad up and stuff in the box.

The two necro-cav pairs were already leaving for the hatch when she returned, and she had to jog to catch up. While Abigail did one last check of everyone's ghost wards — not Gideon's; the vibe she got was that no one else was going to be painting her right then — she passed the box to Magnus and muttered, "can you give that to her?"

Magnus was always very nice. He didn't point out that Gideon had caused all of this by macking on her adept, or that Harrow might already be dead, if the facility decided after all this inactivity that it objected to her presence. Instead what happened was that he angled himself so his wife could see. Abigail Pent heard her and said, briskly, "give it here, I'll make sure she gets it."

Magnus nodded encouragingly at Gideon. There was nothing else to be done. She handed it over. Then the four of them descended the ladder, hand over hand: Camilla, Abigail, Sextus, Magnus.

Up in the dark Gideon waited for them, her left hand in her gauntlet, her right clutched uselessly around her drawn rapier. Time stretched around her. Five minutes, or fifteen, or fifty. They had been down there too long — or maybe too little; maybe Harrow had barricaded herself into a laboratory so nothing could get to her, and they would take another hour to get through her door. She started pacing because the waiting while still was too much, stopped because that was too much too, started again. There were two or three times Gideon had felt guiltier — but not more than that.

Finally the hatch cracked. Light from below crawled out as it opened. Out came Palamedes, who gave her one of those awful gentle looks that always came from him discovering some new fucked up thing the Ninth had done. Out came Magnus, who gave her an actual smile. (That helped a little — that Magnus wouldn't think worse of her for this.) Out came Abigail, who resettled her glasses and turned back to the hatch.

Then came Harrow, who hadn't fixed her paint at all — who had tear tracks visible in it, and worse marks — and who climbed out, looked solely at the floor, and moved in Gideon's direction. Gideon took a mechanical half-step to the side to make room for her adept while Camilla slung herself out of the shaft and resealed the hatch.

"Come on then," Magnus said encouragingly. His voice curdled in the silence.

* * *

It was really unfortunate, Gideon thought in a pure, clean moment of panic, that she hadn't thought to pick up earlier. There was a bottle of oil on the low table by her old couch, and Harrow's robes from last night, and a torn pair of underwear.

Harrow noticed none of these as she crossed the room to her bedroom. The noises of someone shifting around every single one of their belongings followed. Gideon closed the door weakly behind her. She wanted to sit down on the floor and tremble, or maybe sink through the floor completely and fall into the ocean. In that moment there was nothing she wished for so keenly as a giant construct to come and smash her through a wall.

Instead of sending a giant construct to crush her into spite-and-regret-flavoured paste, though, Harrow re-emerged with a piece of actual paper in one hand and a pen in the other. Gideon goggled. Without saying anything, Harrow sat down at their ancient, mildly fucked-up dining table, jabbed the pen into her mouth, and started writing.

"Harrow…" Gideon tried when all that happened was a lot of scribbling, and was stopped by an upraised hand. An unpleasant, helpless fury was coming to a boil in her already uneasy stomach. It didn't mix well.

Finally, Harrow beckoned her over. "Sit down, Nav," she said.

Gideon sat.

"Here," said Harrow, and turned the paper towards her. All the hairs on Gideon's neck stood on end.

"This is real Ninth bond," she accused her.

"Yes," said Harrow.

It was once again written correctly and clearly. This time, it didn’t include a commission.

"Harrow," Gideon said, waking at last to the real threat, "what the fuck is this?"

"I release you from your obligations to the House of the Ninth," said Harrow. Gideon rocked back as if struck, which, if you asked her, she had been. "I name the remainder of your indenture as tribute already paid to the Anastasian."

"You absolutely the fuck do not," Gideon said threateningly, and was ignored.

"I leave you the option," Harrow said, "of joining the Cohort as a second lieutenant — if that is what you want, though you are better than fifty of Deuteros — again, already paid by your duty to the Ninth House, which shall bankroll it."

"I'm not touching that sheet of paper!" Gideon shouted. "Enough, Harrow!"

But Harrow pressed on. "I name your duty complete, and your bond fulfilled; I name the chain that bound you to the Ninth severed, and your path free."

"I never gave one _shit_ about duty!" Gideon bawled. "You _complete asshole moron!"_

And then, instead of letting Gideon shout some more about what, exactly, the chain that bound her to the Ninth was, Abigail Pent said very mildly from the other side of the door, "Harrow, I think we should talk."

* * *

The three of them sat around the table in total silence. Harrow, eyes downcast. Abigail, looking gentle, as if that was going to fool Harrow. Gideon, ready to queue up _lo! A destructed ass._

"I don't mean to interrupt you," Abigail said. "But it does seem as if you're having some difficulties with ground we both know I've travelled. Am I wrong?"

"And what would lead you to cast such aspersions on my character?" Harrow said to the table. She looked like any Ninth penitent: like she was begging anyone with the right authority to come along and asperse her posthaste.

"Harrowhark," said Abigail, "you are long past the point of plausible deniability, and when it comes to your personal relationships, you are not as secretive as you think you are." (Gideon thought _relationship,_ let alone relationship _s,_ was putting it a little strongly, since all Harrow had ever done was hatefuck her cavalier and make Ianthe mope in the dining hall with calculated abandon.) "You know I don't say it to insult you. Am I wrong?"

Harrow curled in on herself like a burnt thing. The paint on her face, white and black and grease, had mingled with itself until it was the colour of cremains. The retort of her robes was covered in bone dust, swipes of grey from her face, and unidentifiable stains from the facility below. Her sleeve was ominously shortened where her wrist rested at the edge of the table. She didn't respond.

"Ah," said Abigail sadly after a moment in silence. "I wondered, you know. You always seemed so interested in Magnus and I."

"I apologise," Harrow said immediately. "I didn't mean to — I did not mean to."

"Well," Abigail said, "we've certainly suffered worse than your curiosity. 'It cannot be libidinous,' and all that rot… though I think you know we came at it from the opposite direction?"

"If you mean," Harrow said gradually, "that your husband was — your husband, before he was your cavalier?"

"Exactly," said Abigail. "It made it easier for the two of us, the fact that I wouldn't have another cavalier, and that he had already come to fit the role before we made our vow, really. And there was precedent. You already know it will be harder for you."

"What?" said Gideon.

"You are presuming," Harrow said. Her voice was so colourless it could have been a shirt from the Eighth.

"But am I presuming incorrectly?" Abigail asked gently.

"What you are suggesting is a fantasy," Harrow said. "A figment of a better world, accessible by more luxuriant Houses. We are too cruel for that. There is no one to judge and tally the sins of the Ninth but me, and no one else to remedy them. I ought to be put to death."

"That seems a little strong," said Abigail. "I'm curious, Harrow — would you put me to death?"

"Don't patronize me," Harrow hissed. "I won't do you the disservice of comparing your actions to my own. Do not insult me with false mercy in return."

"Is that what this is about, then?" Abigail asked, and lifted the piece of paper. "Gideon, may I?"

At Gideon's answering wave, she turned her librarian's focus to it. The seconds ticked by in dismal silence. One finely kept pair of Fifth eyebrows crept gradually upwards.

"So you're writing off her indenture," Abigail said finally. "Congratulations, Gideon."

"No," said Gideon mulishly.

"You don't want to be freed? It seems like an important step.”

Gideon couldn’t have distilled how she felt into words if she’d had the next myriad to get it done. She had worked her whole life to slip Harrow’s leash. She knew the narrative arc of all her nasty tricks: Gideon sees open door, Gideon walks through open door, Gideon falls into forty metre pit with spikes at the bottom. And now — now that they _weren’t on the Ninth_ and had _actually said their vows_ and were having, it had to be said, _kind of a good time_ — she was changing it on her!

“I’m not leaving,” Gideon said, and was horrified to find herself near tears.

“We’ll return to that,” Abigail said, and laid a gentle hand on her shoulder, which really didn’t help in the eye department. “Reverend Daughter — ah. Part of the problem?” (For Harrow had flinched massively.) “Harrowhark, when you released her, what did you want?”

“What did I _want,”_ she repeated bitterly. “I have never wanted anything I hadn’t already ruined. If I cannot go back and undo myself, let some of this at least be made right. I have remedied what I could.”

"You haven't remedied shit," said Gideon, who had just been un-cavaliered while trapped on the First and wasn't feeling too charitable about it.

“It’s true, you should have ended her servitude before you became involved,” Abigail said gently. “I have to say, it was a shock to read. I doubt any of the rest of us would have guessed at that. Gideon, have you been treated like a bondswoman since you came here?”

What the fuck does a bondswoman get treated like? Gideon thought. All her horrible feelings had compacted themselves into a point in the center of her chest, and it felt like at any second they were going to pull the rest of her torso in. Like meat and fuel for the Ninth house? But they had left Crux behind. Left without heating, or shitting blood in her cell? The murder attempts had stayed on the Ninth, too. Kept out of the loop, and removed from her mistress’s secrets? Harrow had already confessed the worst thing that had ever happened to her. The carved doors of Drearburh were far away. They had been free for three and a half years.

“I’m her cavalier,” Gideon said.

“Quite,” said Abigail Pent, with some satisfaction. “Harrowhark, will you look at me?”

Wonder of wonders, Harrowhark did.

“Regardless of what preaching you have heard, you are allowed to want your cavalier,” Abigail said. “I have personally seen written records of necro-cav relationships nearly as old as our first written records of necromancy. No moralizer has ever managed to stop it or corrupt it. It is not a crime to desire someone else, Harrow. When this started between the two of you, was Gideon reluctant?”

“Definitely not,” said Gideon, who had started all this by kissing Harrow in a pool anyway.

“If she was reluctant afterwards, did you press her?”

“No,” said Harrow in a voice Gideon had barely heard before. Gideon shook her head in agreement.

“And if she decided she was done tomorrow — ” Gideon bristled — “would she be free to go?”

Harrow gestured silently to the piece of paper.

“Exactly,” Abigail said. “Ideally you would have done it sooner, but when you realized you needed to do it, you did. Harrow, you are not a predator. You are just a young woman with a higher than average amount of self-loathing, and a very good cavalier, in whose care I’ll leave you now.”

And then, at the threshold, she whispered to Gideon: “good luck!”

The door closed behind her. Gideon turned around. Harrow was still seated, hunched over, facing away from the entrance. Some passerby could have grated leeks on her back.

“You haven’t eaten anything today,” she realized.

“That’s what you have to say?” Harrow asked. Her voice was wrecked: shot through with faults, and raspy, as if she had managed to cry for three or four seconds while Gideon and Abigail were occupied, then forced herself to stop.

“No,” said Gideon, “I have a whole bloody lecture to read you, corpse countess, about _not fucking dying in a bone._ I thought we were past all of this. Forget alone! I thought you’d promised not to go down there without three other people and the body paint.”

There was a long pause. “I’m sorry,” Harrow said. Her hand trembled on the table.

“Why was that what you did?” Gideon asked after another minute. Her voice bounced plaintively off of their shared effects. “I thought — you could have died, Harrow!”

“I know,” said Harrow; it was possibly the smallest she had ever heard her sound. “And my decision placed the Sixth and the Fifth in danger. I cannot repeat this.”

“But _why?”_ she demanded. “I’m not going to be mad if you don’t love me back.” It still sounded so strange to say it; Gideon wasn’t even sure she’d meant to a second time. “I just — you almost killed yourself. All you had to do was call me a moron and pull my hair and I would have shut up about it.”

“This is exactly why,” Harrow said, which did shrivel Gideon’s heart a little. “I clawed you to pieces for the whole of our childhoods. I did my best to grind your spine to dust! And now, without releasing my power over you, I’ve led you into my bed! When I tell you I have spent my life destroying you, you embrace me! When I tell you I brought you here to die, you apologise! And I take advantage of you — I cannot help but manipulate you — I use your mercy, and your baser cravings, and I claw you back again!”

The effect of this speech on Gideon was electric. She almost screamed with anger. “Harrow,” she said, forcing the words between bloodless lips with some effort, “do I — fucking — look — like I am craving the fingernails of your manipulation, or whatever you just said?”

Harrowhark Nonagesimus took one look at her cavalier and found that discretion was the better part of valor.

“I didn’t know it was possible for anyone to hate themselves so much and still claim too much credit. Harrow, I love you," said Gideon — fuck, she had really unstoppered herself, it just kept coming out — "but you don't have the power to do that to me. You little tyrant, you never have. You and Crux tossed me back in my cell for the eighty-seventh time and I still almost tied you in the universe's pointiest, most thanergetic knot on the shuttle here! You have all the meanest bullshit the Ninth could come up with at your disposal, and the best results you ever got came from just fucking asking."

“Oh,” Harrow said. It was a weak sort of sound. She stared at Gideon in a way Gideon rarely saw — like when she forgot to sleep, and Gideon made her, and she woke up with the answer to whatever bone problem had beaten her the day before.

Gideon stepped in closer. Again she took Harrow’s hair in her hand, holding her by the nape. Here again was her face with its mask of cruelty, her brows dumbstruck and black, her parted lips. Her eyes had the gentleness of exhaustion. 

“Do you want to object to me being in love with you?” Gideon asked. “You don’t have to understand it or agree with it. But are you okay with it?”

After a moment, Harrow nodded, then tilted her head up. Gideon closed the killing distance and pressed her mouth to hers; pressed her mouth to hers again. After a moment they broke to rest forehead against forehead.

“Gideon Nav, first flower of my house,” Harrow said hoarsely. Her breath tickled on her lips. “You are the greatest cavalier we have ever produced. I have no bargain to make for your advantage. I ask you by no right. Will you grant me the privilege of being your necromancer?”

“You always use so many words for this,” Gideon said. Her voice had tightened and thickened, and the words barely made their way out through it. “Come on. One flesh — ”

“ — one end,” sighed Harrow, and they were complete again.


	6. octopus puddle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They're at college or something and Harrow makes Gideon stay still while she masturbates and they argue. // masturbation, college au, obedience

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ty pals

Gideon falls back onto the bed, fucked out and still breathing heavy. The ceiling is cracked a little. It’s not the most concerning thing about this dormitory; after all, there is a giant herald corpse where the common room used to be on the first floor. It’s very decorative during parties. Someone always puts a hat on it according to the theme. Jesus, she’s glad she doesn’t live here.

She looks over at Harrow, who is sitting up against the wall, tucked into the corner of the tiny extra-long twin in her sparse and neat room. She also looks fucked out, but the difference is that while the feeling turns Gideon into a kind of octopus-puddle hybrid, Harrow seems ever more prim. 

Gideon rolls her eyes, and says, “You good?”

Harrow glances over at her, and then up at a clock. Who has a clock in their dorm room? Like, a proper analog wall clock? Harrow’s cheeks are pink. One of her perfect, tiny breasts is hanging over her bra, and her nipple is also pink. Gideon looks at it, briefly distracted, and wants it back in her mouth. She’s about to say so, when Harrow finally responds. “I’m good, Nav. Thanks. Get out, I have homework.”

“I know,” says Gideon, too aware of the blissful octopus puddle feeling drifting away in the face of Harrow’s very un-octopus-friendly post-coital behavior. She sits up and nods over at Harrow’s desk, where her notes are spread out. She’d set them out before Harrow had climbed into her lap. “I literally came here to do our homework.” 

“Sure,” says Harrow, unfairly sarcastic for someone who had been the booty caller, not the callee. She climbs out of the bed and picks up her underwear, her jeans. Gideon watches her pull them up one by one over her hips. Wow, she wants to put her mouth there too. There is no end to Places On Harrow Nova’s Body where Gideon is willing to put her mouth. Unfortunately. But Harrow is zipping up her jeans and putting her computer and her notes into a bookbag, clearly planning on heading to the library. 

“You’re a piece of work, Nova,” says Gideon, but she follows Harrow’s lead. Harrow snipes at her the whole time, so clearly irritated, which so thoroughly irritates Gideon, that she doesn’t even notice until she’s halfway across campus that she’d left her notes on Harrow’s desk.

\--

The thing is, Gideon has never had so much sex before in her life. There was the strange and tender blip at sixteen, she and Dulcie hushed and exploratory in inexperienced fits and starts after school; there was what Gideon might call her slutty phase, when she first arrived to college and realized that it didn’t take much after all to get women in bed. But the thrill of that had more or less worn off simply because she never could figure out what it was they liked about her. It was a mystery that bothered her if she spent too much time thinking about it, so she simply avoided the topic altogether.

All of that had been before the first time she’d met Harrow, as part of a group project in a biology class that was very important to Harrow and kind of an easy A for Gideon. They had hit it off -- or tried to murder each other -- and voila. Now Gideon worries a tiny bit her clit might fall off from overuse. It’s fine.

The great thing about Harrow is that Gideon knows more or less where she stands in Harrow’s estimation: not very highly. There is something beautifully enticing about fucking a girl who would just as soon as spit in her face than kiss it, and Harrow is exactly that girl.

So they keep coming together (heh heh) time and again, and have been for nearly four months now. Every time leaves Gideon feeling fully satisfied, but also, always, irritated. Sometimes it’s because Harrow has a tendency to act like all the sex is Gideon’s idea, even though Harrow had made the first move, and clearly has the upper hand; sometimes, it’s just because somehow Harrow knows exactly how to push all her buttons. In bed, this is incredible. Out of it, Gideon wants to throw dirt in her face every so often.

Which doesn’t stop Gideon from texting her again. 

Or sometimes, hours later, when she knows the library is closed, and Harrow is back in her dorm. 

_ G: U up? _

_ H:Yes. Unfortunately. _

_ G: What r u wearing lol _

_ H:Nav, are you fucking kidding me? Are you a frat boy or something? _

_ G: _ _ Nah just kinda horny :) _

_ G: And u said u wanted 2 try 69 _

_ H: Fine. Come over.  _

\--

This is not the first time they’ve fucked more than once in the same day, though usually that happens on weekends, and usually it’s because Gideon was in Harrow’s bed in the morning and fell into bed with her again late that same night. It’s not usually because of two discrete booty calls in the same day, although Gideon holds that  _ she  _ is the only one who sent out an actual “wanna fuck?” text, since Harrow’s literally just said, “I need help on my essay. Meet me in my dorm at 3PM.” At least Gideon is straightforward. At least she is aware of and  _ acknowledges _ how overwhelmingly, constantly horny she is for the most annoying person alive.

She knocks on Harrow’s door precisely ten minutes after Harrow tells her to come over, and it opens almost immediately. Harrow looks small and angry, her arms crossed over her chest, backlit by her desk lamp. Her hair is a mess like she’s been running her hands through it and pulling at the ends. Gideon thinks, I really want to kiss her, and she leans down and does so.

The secret that Harrow would never, ever, not even a little bit,  _ never _ admit, the one that she would refute beyond a shadow of a doubt if Gideon ever called her out on it, is that Harrow always melts a little when Gideon kisses her. Like, when Gideon wraps her arms around Harrow’s shoulders, she can feel the ever-present tension across Harrow’s upper back begin to dissipate. She can tell by the way Harrow always sighs a little bit, or by the way she does this cute little humming noise after a few moments, like she’s actually kind of happy. Gideon isn’t ever going to call her out on it. She thinks she would miss it too much if Harrow stopped.

Thank God there’s no time to interrogate  _ that _ thought, because Harrow moves fast. She kicks the door closed behind Gideon and pushes Gideon so her back is against the cold wooden door. Gideon makes a million jokes about how Harrow is so tiny compared to herself, how Gideon could pick her up between two fingers, mostly to make Harrow mad, but to see them now it would be hard to imagine that  _ Gideon  _ isn’t the one that could be lifted into Harrow’s palm and blown away like so much dandelion fluff. Harrow puts pressure on her arms until she has Gideon’s palms flat against the door, and whispers “Don’t move” into Gideon’s ear before licking a trail down her neck and stepping back.

Gideon raises her eyebrows at Harrow, surprised, and Harrow raises her own eyebrows back, a challenge. She doesn’t break eye contact as she slowly unbuttons her shirt. She isn’t wearing a bra. Gideon’s palms sweat but Harrow is topless in front of her. She isn’t going to do anything that Harrow wouldn’t want her to.

Harrow puts her hands on her hips and just looks at Gideon. It’s the  _ way _ she looks though that has Gideon immediately wanting to grab for her and push her down onto the bed, but she won’t. Not even when Harrow takes a few more steps backward -- unzips her jeans and steps out of them -- sits down on the bed and leans back, totally naked, still staring at Gideon. Her nipples, again, are very pink. Gideon’s mouth waters.

“Oh,” she says, a bit helplessly. 

“You wanted something?” says Harrow, like she wants to start a fight about it, sounding as if she isn’t blushing and suddenly shy, glancing away from Gideon’s face and back again. 

“Yeah,” Gideon croaks. Not for any reason. It’s just, like, Cam always has cigarettes, and Gideon always wants one when she’s drunk. She should probably drink more tea. She clears her throat and says again, tongue feeling drier by the second as she watches Harrow trail her fingers along her stomach, “Yeah, um. Yeah, I wanted -- ”

At that moment, Harrow pinches one of her pink nipples. The sight is  _ extremely  _ distracting, and so is the sound, the exhale catching on a tiny moan, and Gideon loses whatever she had been about to say. It hadn’t been important anyway, had it? The brief moment of shyness from before is gone. Harrow’s gaze is hot and certain; she watches Gideon as her other hand drifts lower, between her legs. 

Gideon pushes herself against the wall, barely even realizing that she’s taking a step towards the bed, and Harrow immediately sits up and frowns. “What are you doing?” she says, and Gideon freezes. 

“Nothing?” she says.

Harrow rolls her eyes. “Get back over there. Don’t  _ move _ ,” she adds, and Gideon has never exactly been  _ good _ at following directions, but she could learn. Probably. She obeys Harrow, pressing herself against the door, and swallows as she watches Harrow settle back down on the bed.

“Now why you couldn’t have just done what I said when I  _ told _ you we had to use APA format,” Harrow says. At first, Gideon doesn’t hear her. She is too distracted by the way Harrow’s fingertips are brushing along the edges of her cunt, the way Gideon can see how wet she’s getting from teasing herself while Gideon watches. Then her brain catches up, and Gideon says, suddenly filled with righteous annoyance, “Wait a minute, it’s not  _ my  _ fault I had a shitty high school teacher who only ever taught us the one style. Like, if you could have just let me email the professor -- ”

“I’m not an amateur,” scoffs Harrow. One of her index fingers circles her clit. Gideon can tell it’s not enough pressure. Not even a little bit. She cannot stop thinking about the way Harrow tastes. 

“No, you’re just a college freshman, you sanctimonious dipshit,” says Gideon, “and you’re allowed to ask the grown-ups for help.” Harrow presses down on her clit and her eyes flutter closed. Gideon licks her lips. If her mouth were on Harrow right now, her chin would already be dripping. “You don’t have to act like you’re defending a dissertation! Fucking  _ Colum _ could’ve aced that essay if he’d written his name backwards, the professor’s a pushover.” 

Harrow’s fingers are rubbing faster, and Gideon’s own fingers itch knowing what it’s like to touch Harrow’s clit -- slippery and silky at once, the hard bud of it. She presses her fingers harder against the door to stop herself from moving towards Harrow, to get her delicious cunt in her mouth.

Harrow has her eyes closed and Gideon focuses in on the way her mouth falls open. She fucking loves this part. It’s when Harrow starts forgetting to hold herself back. When she starts letting out sounds that drive Gideon crazy, and make her press her tongue deeper inside Harrow’s cunt, chasing the gorgeous flavor deep inside. “It’s not a -- ” Harrow sighs here, and Gideon has to bite down on the tip of her tongue, “it’s not about the  _ grade _ . It’s about the principle of the thing.” She punctuates her next sentence by pushing two fingers into herself: “Professionalism.  _ Matters _ .”

Gideon does not actually have an argument against this, because she is watching Harrow’s fingers slide in and out. They’re wet past the knuckle, catching the light from the shitty overhead lamp. She knows she’s just standing there, mouth open, while Harrow arches her back and mutters  _ fuck _ , her throat sticking on the  _ k _ in a way that shouldn’t be that sexy, but kind of makes Gideon feel like a whole other kind of octopus puddle right then and there.

“Harrow,” she says, and then, louder, because Harrow is distracted, “Hey, Empress of the APA Format,” which gets Harrow to flutter her eyes open and stammer out a breathy yet somehow irate “ _ What _ .”

Gideon’s throat is drier than ever, which she can’t blame on Cam now. She can only blame Harrow flushed all over, Harrow moving her fingers in and out, slowly then quickly. She momentarily forgets what she was about to say. “What,” Harrow says again, but she doesn’t sound angry at all, she barely has the breath to push out the vowel, when she flicks her thumb against her clit and just that has her coming all over her own hand. 

Gideon can’t stand it anymore. She wants her mouth right there, she wants to lap it up and get it all over her face. She wants Harrow’s fingers in  _ her _ cunt, she wants Harrow’s mouth along her neck, down to her breasts, down to lick around her own fingers pressing in and out of Gideon. She wants Harrow to tell her that the APA thing doesn’t matter, that she’ll keep Gideon around anyway --

“Get  _ over  _ here,” snaps Harrow, and Gideon obeys. She’s gonna do pretty much anything Harrow says, anyway.


	7. Nine for the Tomb, and for all that was lost

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A triptych of triptychs, three times three.

Nine for the Tomb, and for all that was lost

1a.

“Do. Your. Makeup. Properly!” panted Harrowhark, in time with her motion. Gideon stayed silent beneath her, the too-large strapon stretching her uncomfortably, but Harrow would not have the satisfaction of hearing her moan. In pain. The grit on the landing field of Drearburh cut her knees, but she didn’t give Harrow any sign. She could take this.

Harrow grunted with irritation, feeling the pressure of the strapon against her clit but feeling no pleasure. Griddle was going to react before she showed anything, and she knew how. Flesh magic was beneath a bone magician, but she knew some things. As she reached down to Griddle’s cunt with her free hand, she manipulated the thanergy beneath her palm.

Griddle exploded with ecstasy, screaming out in mingled pain and pleasure, and Harrow pulled out, a superior smirk on her face.

1b.

Harrowhark Nonagesimus bit her lip hard, almost drawing blood. There was no way she was going to give Griddle the satisfaction. As her arch-nemesis skillfully ran her tongue over Harrow’s clit, softly at first around and around her clit, and then harder, harder still - and then as the pressure was almost painful the other girl let off. “Is that what you picked up from your awful magazines” she said scornfully to cover the noises that she would have made.

Griddle’s mumbled words were inaudible and Harrow said “Speak up, Griddle, I can’t hear a word you’re saying”. At that Gideon’s tongue became more insistent, licking at higher speed and with more pressure, and Harrow held back a gasp. It took all her concentration to keep quiet. And suddenly she felt Griddle’s hands slide into her; she hadn’t realised how wet she had got. One finger, then two, sliding in and out.

Harrow could not stop herself from screaming out ecstatically as Gideon’s fingertips stroked her G-spot, and she bucked as she came so hard that she almost lost sense of where she was.

Gideon leant back, a smug, self-satisfied and infuriating grin on her face. “I said, this is all me, bitch”.

1c.

They stood in the salty sea-water, clothes weighing them down, as Harrow continued her explanation.

“I - I did not want to hurt you Griddle! I didn’t want to disturb your - equilibrium.”

“Harrow”, said Gideon. “If my heart had a dick you would kick it.”

She knew how Harrow was. She knew how Harrow felt about her. She had lived her whole life in Harrow’s pocket and in her sights. She knew what that meant, and what their history had proven to her. And maybe she had wanted something else, maybe she had wanted the skeleton girl to show some sign of emotion other than hatred. But Gideon had learned better than that a long time ago.

***

2a.

Gideon struggled against the skeletal hands holding her down, but she already knew it was pointless. Harrow may be weak as a small child with her necromancer build, but she knew her bones. Especially the one she was pushing in and out of Gideon. She’d been expecting it to be painful when Harrow grabbed her after the Winnowing trial, flush from her success, but her necromancer had smoothed the bone down. _Almost kind_ , thought Gideon.

It was different this time. With a construct there to fuck her cavalier, Harrow was free to pay attention to other parts of Gideon’s body. The fingers that had started stroking her nipples were hard and bony, but Gideon gasped in surprise and pleasure. But Harrow didn’t make a sarcastic comment as she had expected - in fact, looking up into the face of the girl in front of her, she was surprised to see curiosity and interest.

“You did well in there, Griddle. You deserve some kind of reward. And what kind of necromancer would I be to deny my cavalier her prize?”

When Gideon came it felt good. Not shameful, and not like she was conceding something. _This is just weird_ , she thought to herself. But she had to admit she liked it.

2b.

“Just lie back and think of Drearburh, my Midnight Hagette,” said Gideon as she lay Harrow down on the bed. Harrowhark Nonagesimus, last of her line and the pinnacle of the Ninth House’s necromantic lineage, had no energy to protest. The latest trial had taken everything out of her, but they were both triumphant, running on endorphins and exultant. As her cavalier lifted up her robe and tenderly licked at her cunt, Harrow lifted up a hand to push her most hated nemesis away, but she didn’t have the energy. Her hand came to rest on Gideon’s head.

The cavalier felt heat come to her face as Harrow’s hand came to rest on her head. She pushed her tongue into the necromancer’s cunt, and heard a sigh come from the mouth of the person she hated the most in the whole world. Hated. She felt the hand stroking at her head, and could almost have believed it was tenderness rather than exhausted absent-mindedness. When she felt Harrow shudder and buck beneath her, Gideon lifted up her head to look her necromancer’s face, but she had fallen straight to sleep after her climax.

2c.

“And do you think you’re worth it?” asked Gideon bluntly. _Two hundred dead children, and I was to be the two hundred and first._

“If I became a Lyctor,” said Harrow meditatively, “and renewed my House - and made it great again, and greater than it ever was, and justified its existence in the eyes of God the Emperor - if I made my whole life a monument to those who died to ensure that I would live and live powerfully…”

Gideon waited, hearing the Harrowhark she knew and had known. Of course she wouldn’t regret even that, the Bone Empress of the Ninth, who only cared for the primacy of her house.

“Of course I wouldn’t be _worth it_ ,” Harrow said scornfully. And Gideon, who had known her their whole lives, heard the bitter self-hatred in that voice. “I’m an abomination. The whole universe ought to scream whenever my feet touch the ground. My parents committed a necromantic sin that we ought to have been torpedoed into the centre of Dominicus for. If any of the other Houses knew of what we had done they would destroy us from orbit without a second’s thought. I am a _war crime._ ”

Gideon felt her heart break in her chest, and knew that nothing would be the same again.

***

3a.

Gideon came back to life - or at least that’s how it felt. She was in Harrow’s bed, but didn’t have the energy to panic. Or - did she even want to panic? Once she would have. But as the Avulsion trial had stripped Harrow’s clothes and paint, something had been stripped from Gideon as well.

As she stirred, she saw movement from the end of the bed. Harrow came into view, her face naked without her facepaint.

“Griddle, you should not be moving! You shouldn’t even be alive after that! I thought - I thought I had killed you, and I am so sorry.”

Gideon tried to make a witty rejoinder but was too drained to come up with the words. She managed a brief “‘m alive” and made a mental note to come up with something clever next time - but was distracted when Harrow tenderly touched her face. She didn’t even flinch from that, or when Harrow kissed her brow. She didn’t even have the energy to be embarrassed when Harrow pulled up the bedsheet and Gideon realised her own nakedness. She felt the inexpert kisses down her body, briefly touching on her nipples and then moving downwards.

As Harrow went down on her, Gideon tried to decide if she had died after all and that this was heaven, and realised she didn’t care as long as Harrow’s tongue never stopped moving.

When Harrow had finished Gideon off, she lifted her head up and saw that her cavalier had fallen straight to sleep.

3b.

They had returned from the duel with something new between them. It had taken some persuading, but now Harrow lay back on the bed and looked apprehensively up at Gideon. With a laugh, Gideon looked down at her. “Don’t worry, Night Boss. I’ll take it slow.” Harrow didn’t seem any less worried by that, and Gideon said more seriously, “I’m not going to hurt you, Harrow. You’ve done the same to me. You’ll be fine.”

Harrow relaxed slightly, and Gideon liberally squirted lube onto the strapon she was wearing. “And you owe me. You did me plenty of times, so now I’m doing you”, she said as she slid carefully into Harrow. Her necromancer tensed briefly against the ropes holding her arms and legs splayed out, and then relaxed slightly as she got used to the sensation.

“That’s not the same, Griddle. This - this is different.”

Gideon laughed at that as she moved rhythmically over Harrow. The strapon was the smallest she could find - it had turned out there was something that the Reverend Daughter was squeamish about after all. But when Harrow had asked her what she needed to do to fully gain Gideon’s trust, she’d backed herself into a corner.

Harrow had not wanted to be this vulnerable. But as she relaxed into it and even started pushing her pelvic bone back toward Gideon’s, the barriers started to break down. As the girl she had hated, had used, had torn down at every opportunity, moved above her, she realised that this was only correct - Gideon was in control, had her at her mercy. And as she came to this realisation, as Gideon bit at her neck and stroked her collarbone, as she was tied down and fucked - she came harder than she ever had fucking Gideon.

3c.

“Harrow,” said Gideon, and her voice caught. “Harrow, I’m so bloody sorry.”

“ _You_ apologise to _me?_ ” bellowed Harrow. “You apologise to me now? You say that you’re sorry when I have spent my life destroying you? You are my whipping girl! I hurt you because it was a relief! I exist because my parents killed everyone and relegated you to a life of abject misery, and they would have killed you too and not given it a second’s goddamned thought! I have spent your life trying to make you regret that you weren’t dead, all because - I regretted I wasn’t! I ate you alive, and you have the temerity to tell me that _you’re sorry?_ ”

Harrow’s composure was long gone, and not in the safe, reassuring ways that Gideon knew. This was new. And this would change everything.

“I have tried to dismantle you, Gideon Nav! The Ninth House poisoned you, we trod you underfoot - I took you to this killing field as my slave- you refuse to die, and you pity me! Strike me down. You’ve won. I’ve lived my whole wretched life at your mercy, yours alone, and God knows I deserve to die at your hand. You are my only friend. I am undone without you.”

Gideon put aside her hatred, her pain, the weight of Drearburh, and reached out to Harrow, wrapped her arms around her arch-nemesis who had destroyed her life. She held her close as they went beneath the water, even as the necromancer realised what was happening.

A long time later, after everything was said and done and their animosity had collapsed in on itself like a neutron star, Gideon finally took the last step across the gulf between them. She kissed Harrowhark Nonagesimus on the lips, and encountered no resistance. They melted into each other as history bled into the salt water, dissolving away and dripping out into irrelevance.


	8. one kiss away from killing

Okay. If this works, it’ll work, and if it doesn’t—

Don’t think about that. 

###

The first time it happened it surprised us both.

Some necromantic mystery had riled you up one day, even before you stumbled upon my latest escape attempt, and you forgot, I guess, that as a rule we really didn’t fight physically anymore. (It wasn’t very fair that I had grown strong and cool and you would forever be scrawny and awful. It just wasn’t.) It was bad luck that you passed the tunnel right where I was making a mad dash for the supply drone that was taking off, bad luck that I heard you howl in rage through my carefully sealed haz suit, bad luck that I stumbled, bad luck that skeletons _burst from the walls_ to slow me down on top of that (you really would decorate anything and everything with bone, you paranoid freak), bad luck that my two-hander was on my back and I couldn’t draw it quickly enough to fight back. Bad luck that I went down. Worst luck of all that this was apparently not enough for you: you were already pinning me to the tunnel floor with some skeletons, but you stalked over and did the dirty work of popping the seal on my helmet and pulling it off with your own little gremlin hands. 

“Oh, Griddle, shirking your duties as usual,” you sneered into my face. “Why am I not surprised?”

The supply drone took off with a whine and a roar, and its sound faded into the distance along with all my hopes and dreams. I’d planned to cling to the underside of it on my way out, but now I was flat on my back on the tunnel floor with _you_ for company.

“Why the fuck,” I managed to choke out, “do you care?”

“Fuck you,” you said. 

“Fuck me yourself, you coward.”

It made the moment very weird. You might have been about to follow up your “Fuck you” with something actually intelligent, but I never found out, because of my dumb mouth. We both froze for a second, and then the sly light of some awful idea crawled into your eyes.

You ran a hand through my hair, fisted it, and pulled my head up. From here I had a spectacular view of your weird blown-out seething expression, like I was the worst thing you’d ever seen. Also a view up your blood-crusted nostrils. Choice.

“Maybe I will, Griddle,” you said. “Maybe I will stop fucking you over and start fucking you. Maybe the way through your thick skull _is_ through your cunt.”

You’d never talked to me like _that_ before. I laughed. “Like you’d even know where to start with that.” Who the fuck would you have practiced on?

“I have a body, same as you,” you said. 

“Yeah, and you probably take sonics with all your clothes on. _And_ the bone jewellery. I would bet all the fusty coffers of this crumbling backwater that you couldn’t tell a titty from an elbow. Especially not on _you_.” Now I was just babbling, because the way you were looking at me seemed like you were serious.

Your lips twisted. “Come to my rooms and find out.”

“This isn’t happening,” I said. “This is _not_ happening. Harrowhorrible Nonagesimustn’t isn’t seriously _coming onto me_ , because it would _literally kill her_.”

“Maybe I hate you enough to occasionally compromise my own principles.” You got to your feet and had a few skeletons yank me to mine. “Come on.”

I stared. “Now?” You were already halfway down the hallway, and the skeletons were nudging me after you. “Oh, okay, now. This is fine.”

You had _rooms_ and not just a cell--swank as fuck. But I didn’t get to look at the decor too long, because you were stripping my haz suit off me as though we were on a spaceship mid-battle and the oxygen levels were dropping fast and--wait a minute--

“I knew it. This was just a trick to steal my haz suit off me. You’re not actually going to— _mmph—_ ”

You slammed your face into mine. What the fuck were you--oh, that was your mouth, you were trying to kiss me. _Not_ how I imagined that happening, at all. “Less force,” I mumbled against you, and you realigned and tried again, gasping something that sounded like “Don’t tell me what to do.” 

You didn’t kiss nicely. There were a lot of teeth and you might have bit me on purpose (wouldn’t put it past you). But dammit, something about it was effective--hot and bothered I certainly was. Logically this should not have been possible. You tasted like blood and greasepaint and something faintly sweet but not in a good way, your fingers were _really_ sharp on my jaw and at the back of my neck, and by the look on your face when you tripped me and slammed me down into the bed, I genuinely thought you had changed your mind and flipped from sex to cold bloody murder. I yanked you down on top of me before you could actually go for the murder, and then you--what were you doing? Gnawing on my neck?

“What are you doing? You said you’d fuck me,” I gasped, because there was no denying it, I was _really_ wet.

“And I _will_ ,” you sexy-whispered, though you didn’t have sexy whispering down very well and it was pretty loud so close to my ear.

And you did keep your promise. You fucked me. Or, well, you tried.

You shoved your hand down my waistband without any sort of finesse whatsoever. You came at my clit with entirely too much gusto. You didn’t even try to take any of my clothes off first, or yours.

You had the spirit, and at that point I really wanted you to get me off. But it was all sort of painful. I knew how I liked it, technique-wise, but I couldn’t really explain it when you were hovering over me looking pissed off and I was equal parts scared _and_ horny. It’s hard to come while someone’s frowning at you, I discovered that day. Look, I really did my best to enjoy it, but you weren’t going to get anywhere without a lot of redirection, and so nothing happened for a mortifyingly long time. You went from angry and determined to angry and frustrated, and eventually I grabbed your wrist and said, “You can stop.”

Your face went confused under the now-messy paint, like a sad kind of clown. “Did you--achieve orgasm?”

“No, you went at it too hard and now I’m oversensiti-- _stop that_.” I winced as you tried to flick my clit again, and yanked your hand out of my pants. “You’re not gonna accomplish anything that way. It’s just uncomfortable now. It’s okay, don’t worry about it, I’d rather you just not.”

You scowled. You didn’t like losing, even if the game was one you’d never played before. Before I could roll away you’d wiped your wet hand off on my shirt in revenge and stood up from the bed, arranging your grisly bone accoutrements, none of which you’d actually bothered to take off. “Then leave,” you said.

“You don’t want me to return the favor?”

“No, why would I want that? I hate you.” You made a skeleton throw your door open. “Out.”

“What, you don’t cuddle?”

“Out,” you repeated, as dignifiedly as you could with definite traces of wet-ass pussy under your fingernails.

“Gladly,” I said, zipping my fly back up on the way toward the door. “Hey, where’s my haz—”

You smirked through your awful smeared paint. “You won’t be needing that anymore.”

As you slammed the door shut behind me, I caught sight of a skeleton scurrying away down the corridor with my haz suit. 

“Nonagesimus, you sneaky _bitch_!”

Fuck’s sake. That had taken _weeks_ to get ahold of.

###

The second time went like this:

I’d been given punishment by Crux, who sucks, for something stupid I don’t remember the what or the why of, and that punishment was going to work in one of the rows of skeletons in the leek fields, hoeing and hoeing and hoeing away. Not the kind of hoeing I imagined doing when I finally trounced puberty in glorious combat. And once you got wind from Crux of what he was having me do that day, you took the lift all the way to the surface to stand there and watch me and sneer.

“Gonna just stare with your mouth open like that?” I said.

You sniffed and rearranged your robes, and otherwise said nothing at all. 

“Oh, no biting retort, no barbèd sting? Watching skeletons break up clods of dirt is really interesting for you, huh?”

You still didn’t talk. I might have thought you’d come up to enjoy all two of the sad rays of Dominicus that reached the surface, except that you’d never enjoyed anything in your life. Eventually you said, “I requested this disciplinary action for you. Specially. I thought you’d hate it, and that thought brought my cold shrivelled heart some marginal joy.”

I swung the hoe into the hard bad soil, imagining it was your face. “Don’t let having power over me make you all hot and bothered, dusky dictatrix.” 

“You’re the hot and bothered one here, Griddle.” Your voice came out cold and loud in the gloom. You could afford to say shit like that up here, because I was the only other one around with eardrums.

“No, you,” I said. “I can sense it in the air. You’re thinking, ‘Gee, hope I don’t give away how turned on I am watching my indentured servant do _tasks_ against her will. Hope no one knows I’m secretly a fucking sadist—”

“Griddle, that is patently untrue. Having power means nothing to me. It is the burden I must bear.”

The little smile on your face was as smug as a cat’s asshole. Lately you’d been atrocious, getting on my nerves more than usual, and hoeing wasn’t doing enough for all the steam I’d built up. 

“Uh-huh,” I said. “Keep telling yourself that. You _love_ it. Your whole life is one long power trip. ‘Oh, Anchorite Sepulchrian, kiss the toe of my dusty boot. Oh, Pilgrim Quintine, we don’t worship the Tomb here, we worship _me_ , its keeper and mistress.’ I’d think you were addicted to it if I didn’t know you were _really_ addicted to puppeting corpses around--” 

You were stalking towards me then, five incandescent feet of rage. “ _You_ should be addicted to shutting the fuck up.”

“You wanna fuck me so bad it makes you look stupid,” I said, because you did look stupid, all glassy-eyed under your death’s-head paint. You never took kindly to being told you looked stupid— I knew that’d set you off, and honestly, I’d said it cause I wanted to set you off. Hey, it beat field work.

“Nav, you piteous peon,” you said chidingly, “you can’t _say_ these things around your osseous brethren. They might get _ideas_.”

“Was that supposed to be scathing?” I said. “You might want to workshop that one. Even I know those shits can’t hear.”

You rolled your eyes. “I have always longed for someone to charm the pants off me. Alas, criticism doesn’t quite do the trick, I find.”

“Are you implying you want me to take your pants off?” There was just enough silence while you tried to think of something to say that I laughed. “You _are_. Make a proposition or leave, you umbral creep. I’ve got a field to hoe.”

God, what would be worse? Hoeing this field or hoeing _your_ field? No, that wasn’t even a question. This shitty leek field could suck it.

You didn’t leave. You also didn’t say anything. I really had no idea where we stood after that one awkward day two weeks ago where I tried to escape and you tried to finger me and neither of us succeeded, so I ignored you and got back to the stupid hoeing. With you there I couldn’t skive off or Crux would hear about it and give me _more_ days up here, so I did all the shit the skeletons were doing, nice and tidy in their little line. Occasionally I looked back at you: you were standing there, muttering to yourself, moving your fingers, and a couple times a skeleton would twitch or jerk or collapse entirely and reform itself with a few more bones attached. You really had come up to do maintenance. Weird, but fine. 

I tossed my hoe down at the end of the hour for a break and said, because it was honestly eating at me, “So you really _didn’t_ come up here to have me take your pants off?”

You steepled your fingers with great gravity and said, “Since you persist… I do find myself troubled. By thoughts of—”

“--horny?”

You glared. “Hatred.”

“They’re not mutually exclusive,” I said. “I can hate you and be really excited to get in your pants at the same time.”

“I’m wearing skirts today, actually.”

“Whatever. Reason being,” I continued, “unlike you, I know how to get a girl off. And I can prove it.”

Your eyes narrowed. “Such confidence. I can’t wait to see you fail.”

I grinned, but—

“ _After_ you’ve finished with…” You gestured vaguely. “Whatever this is.”

“You really don’t want to wait that long, trust me.”

“I think you’ll find I can be very patient.”

I laughed, because of the memory of you rubbing my clit like you were trying to start a motor. “Don’t you have literally anything better to do?”

“I take pride in making sure my workforce is operating at its full capacity. This includes you. Get back to it.”

Holy fucking shit, you really did stand there while I hoed this whole field.

Once it was done, you walked around it, staring at the ground as though you knew what good hoeing looked like, and then you collapsed the skeletons one by one. They’d lie here in the dirt until someone reactivated them for the next phase of snow leek husbandry. Then you motioned me over to the lift. “Come on. Get on with it. Show me your incredible technique.”

“In the lift? Kinky.”

You produced an evil-looking key and wedged it into a little hole in the control panel as the doors groaned shut. “So no one else calls it,” you explained. 

“Less exciting.” Great, now I was trapped in a tiny space with a witch from hell--but I would be lying if I said I wasn’t kind of amped to prove myself. “Hey, can I see your tits this time? I was serious, I do want to know if you can tell them from elbows.”

You sighed. “Griddle, your concupiscence is absolutely your worst quality.”

“My _wh_ —”

“Yes,” you interrupted. “You may.”

You pulled up your shirt with so much ceremony I would have laughed at you except I really did want to see my first pair of tits in the flesh (that weren’t my own). They weren’t anything close to elbows. I might have apologised for saying that then if you hadn’t been glaring at me down your nose like I was a malevolent lichen. 

“Can I touch—” I began, but before I even finished asking you’d grabbed my hand, relieved it of its work glove, and planted it on your tit. 

Super non-elbowy. Fuck, they were satisfying. Soft and palmable. I could’ve stayed there all day, except you said, “Griddle. You said you knew what you were doing.”

“Shut _up_ ,” I said, and kissed you to drive the point home. Not because I liked you, because who would, ever. This was fine until you bit my top lip and wriggled against me and said, “Get on with it.”

“Haven’t you ever heard of foreplay?”

“No,” you said, and horrifyingly enough, no, you wouldn’t have, would you. “Come on. Prove to me there’s _some_ benefit from letting all your nasty magazines through.”

I had no good reply to that, because I was sort of busy with the problem of figuring out where the skirts ended and the relevant bits of you began. You hadn’t been lying: you were wearing skirts, plural. Under the floor-length drapey one was a knee-length wooley one, and under that was bare thigh, hot under my hand, and then a bit of hair, and then--

“Oh my god,” I said. “I thought you’d be wearing seven pairs of underwear, not _none_.”

“I dress strategically.”

“And you’re _soaked_.”

Your hips twitched into my hand. “Not relevant.”

What you’d said finally caught up to me. “Nonagesimus,” I said slowly, “did you plan ahead for this?”

“No.”

I grinned. “Liar.”

I found your clit and got down to business. I swirled my middle finger around it in the way that _I_ liked, which made you gasp, and then tried some creative up-and-down work, which made you moan. Neat. Your sharp little fingers were digging into the back of my neck and my shoulder, and I figured the more they tensed the better I was doing.

So this technique seemed to be paying off, and I was having a _great_ time. Also, I got to squeeze your boobs when I could muster up enough dexterity to do different things with each hand, which was very fun for me. The upper part of your chest was flushing red and god, this was just so satisfying. Who knew I’d be so good at this? (Me. I knew. I’d always had faith I’d be a natural sex god.) Feeling bold, I slid a finger inside you. 

“No, none of that,” you said, without opening your eyes. 

I slid it back out and went back to your clit. “You realize that telling me things makes this easier for me, right?”

“Harder,” you said.

“No, it makes it easier because--”

“ _You_. Harder.”

Oh, that was a demand. I laughed into your neck. “Can’t believe you’re begging for it.” 

You whined, actually _whined_ , and ground yourself into my hand. 

“Oh shit, you like that,” I said. “You planned ahead for this and didn’t even wear any underwear. Fuck. That’s--that’s really hot, actually. Were you watching me that whole time, imagining me fucking you?”

You buried your face in my shoulder and your hips bucked into me as you shuddered and gasped, and yeah, if my personal experience is anything to go by, I would say you came. One point to Gideon Nav.

“Good?” I said, once your heartbeat and breathing had slowed down. “That seemed good.”

“I will grant it was certainly effective,” you said.

But now you were back to stony piss-off-ed-ness, and you did not offer to return the favor. You untangled yourself from me, put your skirts back down and fixed your shirt, and hauled the lift door back open. Then you made weird shooing motions until I got the idea that I was supposed to get out. 

“Hey, I’m going back down too,” I said. “You can’t share a lift with me?”

“Questions are the last thing I need. I hate you,” you added, punching buttons on the control panel. 

“Yeah, good, same,” I said, as the door creaked closed. 

Then it was just me and the leek fields and a vicious pain near my neck. I’m pretty sure you bit my whole trapezius in half when you came. But I’d trade my whole right trap for the sense of satisfaction I got from making you come on the first try. 

###

The third time went like this:

I had said something really stupid, possibly mean, in front of you and Aiglamene both. Aiglamene’s eyebrows went up, and your whole face went red and you said, “Griddle. In the hallway. Now.”

I followed you into the hallway and you laid into me immediately. 

“Griddle, how dare you talk like that to me _in front of one of my most trusted retainers_?”

At that point I’d honestly forgotten what I’d said because I was too fixated on the fact that the last two times we’d been alone, something kind of like sex had happened. My blood was rushing south in a hurry and there was none left for brain function. 

“You’ve said shit like that to me my whole life! Tit for tat, bitch,” I said. For that you grabbed my nipple and twisted. Your aim was amazingly accurate through the whole two jackets I had on. Joke’s on you, though. I _liked_ it. “Hey, do that again.”

Your face moved through various shades of disgust before settling on sadistic glee. “You like this?” The gasp I let out should have been answer enough, but you said, “Words. Use them.”

“ _Yes_ I like it, holy shit—”

You let go then. I might have whimpered. You said, “Good to know. I won’t do it again,” like a fucking sadist, and flounced back into the training room to wrap up whatever horrible little gossip sesh you were having with Aiglamene. Aiglamene left after a few minutes of that, probably because she secretly couldn’t stand you. Then you turned to me and demanded, “Come to my rooms.”

“Why, so you can maim me atrociously again? Do you know how hard you bit me last time? Hey, can you tell Aiglamene it’s your fault my overhead strikes are lopsided this week, so she’ll get off my case about it?”

“I’ve been doing research. You may benefit from it.”

“Weirdest sex proposition I’ve ever heard,” I muttered, but followed you anyway. “Wait, that was what I thought it was, right?”

You didn’t even have to look back for me to know you were sneering; somehow you’d trained the fabric of your cloak to do that for you. “You have nothing better to do right now. I made sure of it.”

“Creep,” I said. I was cautiously intrigued by the prospect of you looking up stuff to be better at sex. Was that why _The Pussy-Eating Pentad, vol. XX_ had gone missing from under my mattress? It did have some really good pussy-eating tips in it.

Turns out yes, you’d gone and thieved PEP20. I could tell because you wiped your face free of paint and then immediately tried to write the whole alphabet on my clit with your tongue. Anyone with any taste (ha) knows it’s a dumb idea, but good for you for trying. And better for me, because this time I wasn’t having my clit attacked like it was an invasive virus and you were my immune system. It still took awhile, because one of the pussy-eating tips clearly hadn’t been _Don’t scowl._ But when I finally came, I was feeling nice and dozy and possibly the faintest tinge of chivalrous. I’d return the favor, I decided. But first I had to clear up the situation. I said, “So are we gonna, you know?”

You stared at me flatly. “Words.” 

Damn, not even successfully munching some of my secret sweetness could put a smile on your face. You looked like your parents had died all over again.

“You know.” I squirmed a little. “Talk about this? This situation?” 

“What is there to talk about?”

Okay, that sounded like a no, then. I let my head fall back against the pillow. “Cool. I hate you, you know. Even if you did finally make me come.” 

“I hate you too. Get out of my sight.”

My head popped back up. “I thought I could eat you out in return, maybe.”

“No,” you said, as though you were refusing another helping of porridge and not the opportunity to have a verified sex virtuoso (me) doing virtuoso things with a tongue (attached to me). “I grow weary.”

 _Weary_. Honestly. You were so fucking weird sometimes.

###

And then there was the time we didn’t.

I became your cavalier officially not long after that last time, and then it all stopped. 

All of it. 

There was no more of you ogling me as I hoed fields, no more me riling you up intentionally so I could have the possibility of maybe grabbing your butt. The air between us stagnated and grew cold and all the tension shattered. It was a professional relationship now. Necromancer and cavalier. Nothing more allowed. Neither of us even had to say as much.

Fuck, I kind of missed it, though. You were still a nasty wicked bone witch who made my life hell, but once you’ve had a couple fingers inside someone and a mouth on their tit and watched their face while they come, you can’t help but feel a little soft toward them, you know? Even a nasty wicked bone witch with no redemptive qualities whatsoever. 

Sex is weird like that. 

We went to Canaan House. I tried my best to be a good cav. You tried your best to shake me. “I’ll handle this all myself, Griddle” my _ass_ \--you got yourself stuck in a bone cocoon. Dweeb.

It was fine. By which I mean, no it wasn’t. We were clearly the shittiest necro/cav pair at Canaan House even if no one else could tell apart from Sex Pal. (Haha, Sex Pal.) Even though I was now thinking about sex _all the time_ , and about the way you smelled, and tasted, I tamped it down. Repression: successful. Until the one time we _really_ blew up at each other, because emotions were running high, and people were dying, and you used that against me like an asshole, like a fucking sociopath, and I hated you so much in that moment, more than I ever had at Drearburh, that I wanted to betray you, I wanted to fight you, I wanted you to know how much you’d hurt me. I wanted you to bleed, I wanted you to cry out, and cry, and take it back, and moan, and I wanted--I wanted—

I wanted so many things but all of them were you and it was exactly like what we’d been like back at Drearburh turned up to eleven, so did what came naturally: I grabbed you by the front of your shirt and pushed you against the wall of the corridor. I stopped myself before I could actually go any further-- _but the sanctity of the necro/cav relationship!_ some tiny Aiglamene-shaped voice was crying in the back of my mind--but you surged into me anyway.

You howled in rage against my mouth. You kissed me with sheer searing fury, the worst kiss ever, all tongue and teeth like you were trying to scrape bits of me away. Your fingers clawed at my back and dug into my scalp and you clamped your legs around my waist and wouldn’t let go. You were shaking. We both were. Then I made the mistake of breaking away.

As long as we didn’t have to look at each other, this worked. No one had to confront their emotions if we both just pretended we did not see it. But the naked truth plain on your face that moment--it wasn't hate. And I'm pretty sure it wasn't hate on my face either.

“Do you really not need me?” I asked, and my voice broke in the middle of the sentence. “Harrow. Do you really never remember about me half the time?"

Your face crumpled. Your thumb stroked across my lip and I kissed it as it passed, and then after a paralyzing moment in which I swore I could hear our hearts beating, you closed your eyes and pressed your lips gently, so gently, to mine.

I knew what your hands felt like, scratching at the planes of my back. I knew what your body felt like, pressed hot and bony against mine. But though your teeth had cut against my lips, my shoulder, my thigh, and though your tongue had finally learned to treat a girl right, you had never actually kissed me with any kind of gentleness or care. Nor I you. That felt like a step too far, somehow. We could pretend it wasn’t real, didn’t mean anything, if we were never tender. 

But that time, when we pulled back and stared at each other--you with horror, me with I’m sure something like amazement-- you said, “Gideon,” in a choked little voice, and fuck, you were about to cry.

“Oh no,” I said, “no, what, what is it?” I could deal with pissed-off Harrow. I did not want to deal with crying Harrow. I wasn’t sure if it would embarrass me or totally shatter my heart or both.

"We can't do this," you said, and I knew you meant this, this tender thing. This thing that _I_ suddenly very much wanted to do.

"Why not?" I searched your face. "Yes, we can. Why not?"

“You wouldn’t want to if you knew the truth. Hating me is safer. But you can’t--you can’t _like_ me and not know the whole truth.”

“Yes I can,” I said, into your neck.

You squirmed down and away then; I let you go. “No, Griddle. You really can’t.” You were breathing hard and your face was all screwed up, wrinkling your paint so you looked like a very worried skull. “I can’t let you do that. It’s too much. It’s too big. It’s too—”

You squeezed your eyes shut and exhaled. “I need to think. I need to—rebalance myself. Away from you.” You waved your hands vaguely in my direction. “Away from—this.”

“Okay,” I said, though really I wanted to scream. 

“Okay,” you said, and you turned away and you stalked down the hallway. The shadows swallowed you up, you and your billowy cloak, and I put my head in my hands but I still did not scream. 

And then when you took me to the pool down in the basement of Canaan House, and you told me everything, and I took you into my arms, and held you, and held you, and held you, I wasn’t thinking about hating you. I wasn't even thinking of getting back to what we'd been like on the Ninth. I was just trying to make everything better, so we could leave that all behind and have something good.

“Too many words. How about these-- _one flesh, one end_ , bitch.” I tilted your head up. “Say it, loser.”

“One flesh--one end,” you repeated. 

And then you could say no more.

###

I knew then that together we could handle anything anyone wanted to throw at us. Anything at all. 

And I know we can do it now. 

So, that’s where we stand, Harrowhark my first, my flesh, my end. Let aught but death part thee and me. And honestly, death can go fuck itself too.

Come on, sugar lips. Come back. 

We have hell to bring.


End file.
